No. 1 Offender

Seth MacFarlane has success. Can he now get respect?

MacFarlane provides the voice of the pot-smoking, foul-mouthed Teddy bear in “Ted.”Credit Illustration by Hiroshi Yoshii

Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the television show “Family Guy” and of two other animated series, was excited about making his first movie for several reasons. He thought it would be fun to direct live actors. He was looking forward to being able to shoot scenes from a number of different angles, instead of sending a set of hard-to-change drawings and instructions to a group of animators in Korea. He liked the idea of a sixty-five-million-dollar budget. But, mostly, he hoped that breaking out of the cartoon universe that he has presided over since he was twenty-three might make him stop feeling like Sammy Davis, Jr.

“There’s a prejudice against the medium of animation,” MacFarlane said to me recently. Although he is the highest-paid writer-producer in television history, he feels it acutely: “I don’t care about winning awards, but it’ll be nice to do something that is perceived as slightly more significant.

“ ‘The Simpsons’ is a show that outclasses any number of live-action sitcoms, and it has never got any recognition,” he went on. “It’s like Sammy Davis, Jr., at the Sands. Everyone recognized that he was a great entertainer and an enormous talent, but, you know: Stay out of the casino.”

MacFarlane’s movie, “Ted,” which opens later this month, is an R-rated live-action comedy about a slacker named John (played by Mark Wahlberg), who is stuck living with the consequences of getting his boyhood wish—that his Teddy bear could talk. A companionable state of arrested development is threatened when John meets Lori (played by Mila Kunis, who does one of the voices on “Family Guy”), and she wants the bear out of the picture. The movie hits all the usual MacFarlane marks, with a fusillade of jokes about white trash, Jews, anal sex, and handicapped people.

MacFarlane, who provides the voice of the pot-smoking, foul-mouthed Teddy bear, said that he was taken with the idea of using the cutting-edge technology behind the lush, fantastical worlds of the movies “Avatar” and “Lord of the Rings” in the service of comedy. One of the funniest sequences in “Ted” involves the C.G.I.-assisted spectacle of Wahlberg brutally beating up (and being beaten up by) a bright-eyed stuffed animal.

“Timing is the issue,” MacFarlane said. “There’s often a disconnect between the live actor and the C.G.I. character—you can usually tell that they were done months apart. It’s hard to be spontaneous.” MacFarlane solved this problem by wearing a specially designed motion-capture system that recorded his voice and his movements as he directed.

During filming, MacFarlane stood on set and performed the role of Ted, so that Wahlberg could connect with him better. “I wanted Ted to have the same emotional impact as the rest of the characters,” he said. “It’s hard to do it this way if you’re casting a celebrity voice. If you have Ian McKellen, you’re not going to get him on the set every day.” And if you had Ian McKellen it’s hard to imagine getting him to say the line “You could put the ring in her ass and let her fart it out.”

Lately, MacFarlane has had to cope with the consequences of having his own wishes come true. The financial success of “Family Guy” has made it possible for him to do whatever he likes, and he has spent the past few years working his way through a bucket list of professional fantasies. In addition to writing and directing “Ted,” he released a solo album of himself crooning American standards, which was nominated for a Grammy last year; he signed on to executive-produce a revival of “Cosmos,” Carl Sagan’s PBS series from the eighties about the origins of the universe; he agreed to oversee a reboot of “The Flintstones” (“It’s like being handed the keys to a very classic car,” he says); and he wants to act.

These pursuits raise the question of what will happen to “Family Guy.” Last fall, MacFarlane alarmed the hundreds of people who work on the show by publicly musing that perhaps “Family Guy” should have ended a few seasons ago. (His contract with Fox expires next year.) “It’s something I’ve done for so long,” he told me, sounding like a man who had married his high-school sweetheart too young. “I was twenty-three when I started it.” Arriving at a party in honor of the show’s two-hundredth episode, he spotted me and said, “Oh, if I had known you were here I would’ve pretended to give a fuck.”

MacFarlane’s television empire is based in an office tower on Wilshire Boulevard, catercornered from the La Brea Tar Pits. One day last summer, he was due at an 11 A.M. table read for “Family Guy.” He still writes, produces, and animates the show himself; he’s also the voice of many of the characters. And he has been rewarded handsomely: at thirty-eight, he has a contract that pays him about thirty-three million dollars a year.

Table reads are important for animated shows; they provide the writers with a chance to tweak their jokes before the voice-overs are recorded and the visuals are produced by animators. (A director can’t ask a cartoon character that’s already been drawn to try another take.) That morning, about a hundred people were packed into a lobby outside the reading room—Fox network executives, writers, and voice actors. The walls were painted cheerful cartoon colors, and on them were displayed framed animation cels commemorating the show’s most cherished, and often most provocative, moments. There’s an image from the episode in which Peter Griffin, the series’ bumbling patriarch, appears in fish-net stockings and sings a song telling off the Federal Communications Commission over a montage of the crude plot points for which the F.C.C. has censured the show. (An episode where Stewie, the baby, appears to drink horse semen prompted a deluge of complaints.) “Family Guy” is the Howard Stern of sitcoms. Those who love it regard the show’s consistently offensive story lines as a boisterous crusade for free speech. Others view the show’s popularity as proof of the debasement of American popular culture.

In the lobby, a thrum of tense murmuring began. Where was MacFarlane? A few executives quietly pressed his two assistants, who offered conflicting explanations (“He left his house forty minutes ago”; “He’s not feeling well”). Two hours later, word went around that he was on his way, and people filed into the conference room. At two o’clock, an executive announced that the read had been cancelled. I asked one of MacFarlane’s associates what happened. He said that MacFarlane had been dissatisfied with the day’s script and was at home trying to fix it.

The next day, everyone was back at 11 A.M. At 11:15, MacFarlane entered and sat at the head of the table. Without making eye contact with anyone, he carefully opened his script. There’s something of a cartoon boy about him. He has a wide face, pale skin, inky-dark hair that he styles into a Tintin-like pompadour, and thick, round glasses that recall Sherman and Mr. Peabody. On this morning, he looked a little worse for wear.

“Family Guy” tells the story of the Griffin family and their life in Quahog, Rhode Island. Peter Griffin is a familiar cartoon fool—a blue-collar father with Neanderthalish social views. Peter is married to Lois, a busty lady who patiently endures her husband’s antics. They have three children: Meg (voiced by Kunis), an awkward teen whose homeliness is a regular punch line; Chris, a stoner version of his father; and Stewie, an evil genius of a baby who sounds like Rex Harrison and is preoccupied with killing his mother. Rounding out the family is Brian, a talking dog who has literary ambitions (he worked at The New Yorker) and loves to drink Martinis and chase women.

The show’s critics complain that it is a less-smart ripoff of “The Simpsons,” and MacFarlane acknowledges that Matt Groening was a huge inspiration. But “Family Guy” is much less plot-driven than “The Simpsons”: there’s a surreal disjointedness to each episode. MacFarlane likes to break from the main story to a series of signature “cutaways,” tangentially related scenes that are inserted randomly. (When “South Park,” the other bawdy blockbuster cartoon on the air, parodied “Family Guy,” it showed manatees creating story lines by poking at balls with ideas written on them.)

This ambling approach is yoked to an aggressive shock-and-gross-out agenda: abortion, AIDS, bestiality, Down syndrome, and rape are favorite comic motifs. Pop-culture references are ladled over everything. Michael Rowe, a former writer on the show, explained, “With the cutaways, almost anything goes; it doesn’t have to have anything to do with the story. They come from Seth’s window of reference—seventies TV and ‘Star Wars’ and sci-fi.” Seth Green, the actor who voices Chris, told me, “You’ve got young kids watching our show who weren’t alive twenty years ago and are seeing things for the first time as parodies. The first ‘Star Wars’ they’re seeing is our ‘Star Wars.’ It’s so bizarrely meta.” One academic critic has credited the show with being “the high mark of pop postmodernism.” Six million people tune in every week.

The show is the No. 1 program for male teens, and Fortune has estimated the value of the “Family Guy” franchise at more than a billion dollars. Besides running “Family Guy,” MacFarlane is also the executive producer and co-creator of two other prime-time animated shows on Fox: “American Dad!,” a spoof of fifties sitcoms; and “The Cleveland Show,” which is essentially “Family Guy” with African-American characters.

The script being read at the table that morning, “Friends Without Benefits,” was the work of one of “Family Guy” ’s few female writers, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong. It concerns Meg’s crush on a boy who tells her that he actually wants to have sex with her brother, Chris. When the reading got under way, MacFarlane moved smoothly into the voice of Peter, whose Rhode Island twang he accomplishes by opening his mouth wide and talking out of one cheek: “My daughter is going on a date. Is there a slow-down button on this life thingy?” The room cracked up, and MacFarlane gave a small smile. For the voice of Baby Stewie, he pinched his features and talked through his nose. Oddly, the voice of Brian, the jaded, alcoholic dog, who’s convinced that he’s smarter than everyone else, is MacFarlane’s real voice. He sounded sincere when he read the dog’s lines, his facial muscles at rest. When the script ended, MacFarlane disappeared through the door.

Later, I asked him why he’d blown off the reading. “The more mundane explanation is that I don’t get vacations,” he said. “I once went for fifteen months, working seven days a week, and I put myself in the hospital, just from exhaustion.” He said that he keeps stress in check “by not rushing and giving myself a heart attack trying to get everywhere exactly on time.” He also offered a less mundane explanation: “It’s a regular occurrence for me to step outside my daily activities and contemplate things like the flow of time. We perceive it as moving from one direction to another, but who’s to say it doesn’t move in the other direction?”

MacFarlane’s parents met in 1969 in a health-food store, where Ron MacFarlane, a self-identified hippie, was playing guitar. When Seth was born, in 1973, the family lived in a log cabin in Kent, Connecticut. Ron, who trained as a teacher but worked as a butcher, told me that his son has always been “a little apart from everyone else. There’s a side of him that I can’t quite get to. He never really liked being hugged or touched.”

The TV families that MacFarlane has created—the Griffins, the Clevelands, the Smiths—aren’t drawn from his own life. They’re amalgams of the TV families he liked to watch while he ate dinner with his family in front of the television. All of his shows center on an idiotic, bombastic father, who bears little resemblance to the quiet, contemplative Ron MacFarlane. Nor did Perry MacFarlane, Seth’s mother, who died in 2010, bear much resemblance to the dumb, buxom-mom type who populates MacFarlane’s shows. She did have a salty streak, though. One “Family Guy” staffer told me that, once, Seth called his mother on speakerphone from the writers’ room and asked her to tell the story of how, when she was a kid, she masturbated a dog. After she told the story, mother and son laughed uproariously.

By the time Seth was nine, he was drawing a weekly comic strip for the Kent Good Times Dispatch. In one cartoon, he showed a man receiving Communion and asking, “Can I get fries with that?” Afterward, he says he got his first piece of hate mail, from the local priest, Father Flynn. The MacFarlane family laughed it off, and young Seth decided that pissing people off was cool. “Any excuse for a priest to write a letter to a nine-year-old boy, right?” he said.

In 1987, MacFarlane enrolled as a day student at the Kent School, where his mother worked as an admissions officer. He liked his studies but said that he was put off by the class division between the liberal faculty and the students. “I was constantly getting into political arguments with wealthy classmates who defended George Bush, Sr., or Ronald Reagan,” he said. Seth played the trombone in the school band, and bonded with his father over “Star Trek.” (In high school, he built a replica of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise out of cardboard which took up an entire room in their house.)

In his senior year, MacFarlane won his school’s top art prize and was accepted to the Rhode Island School of Design. As a freshman at RISD, with his love of classic TV and his fantasy of working for Disney, he stood out. It was the early nineties, and the campus was ruled by brooding arty kids in black clothes, basking in the reflected glory of David Byrne, a former student. MacFarlane wore the same preppy rugby shirt every day.

In Providence, he started doing standup (he remembers doing a crowd-pleasing impression of Bill Clinton in conversation with Scooby-Doo). He felt some pressure from his professors to produce work that was more “alternative.” But he didn’t want to.

“As far as tapping into deep-rooted angst, I don’t know why art has to do that,” he told me. “When Sinatra sang a ballad, his heart wasn’t breaking every time he got in front of a microphone. He was an entertainer. He was creating an illusory world. And, for me, that was the fun part. I wasn’t out to communicate deep-rooted pain, mainly because I didn’t really have any. It was always just the self-imposed goal to reach a certain professional level.”

By his senior year, MacFarlane had had the idea that would make him rich: a cartoon about a working-class knucklehead and his erudite talking dog. He spent months drawing, cel by cel, a ten-minute short called “The Life of Larry.” It starts with a camera pan of an upright piano—a nod to the intro to “All in the Family,” the Norman Lear show, which MacFarlane cites as a key inspiration—and comes to rest on a live-action MacFarlane, smoking a cigar. He gives a confident chuckle before introducing the cartoon. “Oh, hi there!” he says. “I’m Seth MacFarlane, associate production coördinating directorial associate managing departmental divisional office supervisor of the international network amalgamation distributor’s corporation management organizational association of men who like pussy.” He had a lot of insight for a young man who had never been inside a movie studio.

In the short, we meet Larry and his dog. Larry goes to see the movie “Philadelphia.” Sitting in the theatre, he claps his hands. “That’s the guy from ‘Big.’ Tom Hanks! . . . Listen, anything that comes out of that guy’s mouth, you know it’s going to be a stitch.” With Larry’s eyes wide, the cartoon pans to a movie screen, and we see Hanks announce, “I have AIDS.” Larry shrieks with laughter.

“My, this Cabernet pairs well with your parents and the four Martinis I had at the bar.”Buy the print »

MacFarlane screened “The Life of Larry” at RISD. Mike Henry, a friend who now works on “Family Guy,” recalls, “Everyone had a sense of ‘Holy shit.’ He had the balls to make this Tom Hanks AIDS joke! But the genius is that it’s coming from this idiot character, who then gives you license to do anything.” The room went wild for “The Life of Larry.” After hours of non-narrative student cinema, it was a welcome relief. That year, MacFarlane won an animation prize as well as a job offer from the Hanna-Barbera studios, in Los Angeles.

Several months later, he arrived in Hollywood and went straight to work as an animator and writer for the Hanna-Barbera cartoons “Cow and Chicken” and “Johnny Bravo.” On his own time, he continued to work on the characters he’d created at RISD. In 1997, Adam Shapiro, an executive at Hanna-Barbera, arranged a meeting for MacFarlane at Fox. MacFarlane brought a copy of “The Life of Larry,” and a pilot script. “I remember saying to Adam, ‘Should I put on a tie?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, no. They’ll laugh you out of the office.’ ”

Fox offered him forty thousand dollars to make a short prototype of a prime-time pilot—“Family Guy.” MacFarlane spent the next six months drawing at his kitchen table. With “The Simpsons,” Fox was the home of hip animation. But the network had slipped to fourth place, and Fox was eager to recapture the viewers that it had lost to upstart channels like UPN and the WB. Fox wanted a show that was both outrageous and safe. “Family Guy” filled the bill.

It helped that the show was inexpensive to produce. Gary Newman, a chairman of Fox Television, recalls, “Seth was like a lamb being led to slaughter. We were anxious to be more aggressive about our budgeting, because ‘The Simpsons’ had gotten expensive; and Seth was so eager to please—no pushback.” Fox signed a deal with MacFarlane for the first season. He called his mother right away. “Sit down when I tell you this,” he told her. “They are paying me a million dollars a year.”

“Family Guy” débuted after the Super Bowl in 1999, to an audience of twenty-two million. Fox quickly signed up for a second season. But, for all the show’s diehard fans, it has inspired a cadre of critics who are just as passionate. The Parents Television Council has repeatedly cited the program, complaining about material that “depends heavily on oblique sexual innuendo and sexual themes such as incest, bestiality and pedophilia.” Ken Tucker, the TV critic for Entertainment Weekly, described it as “ ‘The Simpsons’ as conceived by a singularly sophomoric mind that lacks any reference point beyond other TV shows.” MacFarlane likes to settle his scores within the universe of “Family Guy”: Peter Griffin once wiped his bottom with a page from E.W. and remarked, “Well, at least that’s one problem solved.”

MacFarlane isn’t particularly reflective about his sense of humor. “There’s a fairly broad spectrum of types of comedy that make me laugh,” he said, listing Albert Brooks’s movies, “Airplane!,” and “The Naked Gun.” “But, at the same time, if somebody farts in a room at the wrong time, I’ll laugh my ass off. And I maintain that that is a healthy, honest laugh. There is room for highbrow and lowbrow, and with ‘Family Guy’ we try to embrace a balance between the two.”

When I asked about ethnic jokes, MacFarlane offered the enlightened-liberal defense—at first. “We are presenting the Archie Bunker point of view and making fun of the stereotypes—not making fun of the groups,” he said. “But if I’m really being honest, then maybe there’s a part of me that’s stuck in high school and we’re laughing because we’re not supposed to. I don’t know the psychology. At the core, I know none of us gives a shit.” He went on, “Some people say that stereotypes exist for a reason. I’m in no way qualified to make that determination. But I’m sitting in a room with a writing staff that is in large part Jewish, and those are the guys pitching the jokes.”

MacFarlane is not a subtle ironist. “Family Guy” is more opera buffa than oblique social satire. Still, the show is capable of making fun of its own pop-culture formulas. When a student in a children’s acting class critiques Baby Stewie’s performance by shouting, “You are the weakest link. Goodbye!,” he turns on the girl with withering sarcasm and replies, “That is so fresh! . . . You’ve taken that line and used it out of context to insult me in this everyday situation! God, what a clever, smart girl you must be!”

On a Monday night last summer, MacFarlane jogged onto the stage of a jazz club called Vibrato, in Bel-Air. He had on a slim-cut Gucci suit and clutched a highball glass full of whiskey. Without acknowledging the seventeen-man band behind him, he grabbed the microphone.

“How’re you all doing!” he shouted. A group of middle-aged blond women, holding fast-emptying glasses of white wine, let out a lupine howl from the bar.

Onstage, MacFarlane cut a dapper, if somewhat contrived, figure. Smiling rakishly, he could have been a man auditioning for a part in a Rat Pack movie. “I’m a little under the weather tonight, so forgive me if I sound a little like Joy Behar,” he said. “We are just fucking winging it.” The band launched into “The Night They Invented Champagne.”

The song is one of the tracks on “Music Is Better Than Words,” which was released in September. MacFarlane spent more than a year recording it, and, watching him onstage at Vibrato, you got the feeling that the album was the culmination of a lifelong fantasy—like the bar-mitzvah boy who finally gets to perform “Thriller” for a captive audience.

MacFarlane discovered Sinatra in college and was hooked by his stylized masculinity. “I instantly sparked to it because it was accessible, yet very challenging,” he said. He couldn’t stand the records his classmates listened to. “Nirvana made me want to blow my brains out.”

On the stage at Vibrato, eyebrows knit in concentration, MacFarlane looked truly happy. The band was lush and smooth, and MacFarlane executed the songs with bloodless technical precision. Mid-set, he took a swig of bourbon and introduced his favorite song from “The Sound of Music.” “This was written after Oscar Hammerstein died,” he said. Pause. Long drink. “That’s Rodgers and Hammerstein, for those of you who are fucking idiots.” He cackled and started into “Something Good,” his eyes closed tight, lost in Fraülein Maria’s sentimental paean to her captain: “Perhaps I had a wicked childhood. Perhaps I had a miserable youth. But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, there must have been a moment of truth.” At a table near the front, a little boy asked his mother when MacFarlane would do the voice of Stewie.

I met MacFarlane one afternoon at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. He came bounding in wearing a fitted black button-down shirt, designer jeans, and laceless Converse sneakers—the uniform of the successful Hollywood man-boy. He lives up the street, in one of the canyons of Beverly Hills, and he likes the old hotel. “They never get weird with me here,” he said. He climbed into a green leather booth, picked up a menu, and ordered an Irish coffee—yes to whiskey, no to whipped cream. After he put down the menu, he looked up to see Mark Wahlberg, the star of “Ted,” approaching, in bluejeans and a white T-shirt that showed off his muscles, and with an ACE bandage wrapped tightly around his neck.

“Hey! Mark! How’s it going?” MacFarlane said, his deep voice booming.

“I just had a tattoo removal,” Wahlberg said. “It’s the worst. I’m, like, wrapped up like a mummy.”

Wahlberg saw my notebook and was quick to offer an insight about his friend. “First of all, this is the most talented guy in the world, and he’s the nicest fuckin’ guy in the world,” he said.

“I didn’t plan this. I swear to God,” MacFarlane said.

Wahlberg was getting excited. “He wrote an amazing script! He is, seriously, the fuckin’ man. Put that right on the cover. O.K.? It’s the truth.”

Wahlberg walked away, and MacFarlane picked up the menu again. A smile spread across his face. “I’m going to be a dick and order caviar,” he said.

In the past few years, MacFarlane has polished away his boyish awkwardness. When he arrived in L.A., he could have been mistaken for a Boston I.T. guy on vacation. These days, he looks as if he’s fresh from Tom Ford’s finishing school. Friends trace the metamorphosis to a “Family Guy”-related setback. In 2002, after the series’ third season, Fox cancelled the show, citing a decline in ratings. The cancellation created a brief low point in MacFarlane’s career that he doesn’t like to talk about. He tried to keep busy developing new shows, and he checked in with executives at Fox periodically to see if there was any chance that the show might be brought back—a rare occurrence in TV. But the following year Fox signed a syndication deal with the Cartoon Network, and reruns of “Family Guy” quickly became the channel’s biggest hit. In the spring of 2003, Fox released one of the first-ever DVD boxed sets of a TV show, a “Family Guy” compilation. It sold three million copies. Fox executives reconsidered their decision, and in 2005 they brought “Family Guy” back to prime time, with the season première drawing almost twelve million viewers.

David Goodman, a “Family Guy” executive producer, described MacFarlane’s evolution. “At the beginning, Seth was happy to have his life be ‘Family Guy.’ ” After the show was brought back, though, he changed. “It was ‘Oh shit, my whole life is ‘Family Guy.’ Let me go have fun and date hot girls.” Alex Borstein, who does the voice of Lois Griffin, offered a similar analysis. “Seth had spent so much time in college drawing ‘Family Guy,’ he missed all the fun stuff,” she said. “Suddenly, he started using a stylist, who asked questions like ‘What might look better on you than a weird bowl haircut?’ ”

In a version of the classic revenge-of-the-nerd fantasy, MacFarlane has remade himself into a sort of deity for the young male demographic, for whom his stew of scatological jokes and absurdism is the perfect backdrop for bong hits and surfing the Web. He slimmed down, wore contact lenses more often, and hired a personal chef. He sheepishly confessed that he now works out regularly. “I have a trainer who comes to the house, and we do some cardio, some lifting,” he said. “I hate it—I hate every second of it.”

MacFarlane often drives an Aston Martin, and he owns a replica of the Delorean that Michael J. Fox drives in “Back to the Future.” He recently bought a share in a private jet. He wears expensive clothes, and at all times is meticulously groomed, down to his perfectly uniform arm hairs. In 2004, when People included him in its “Sexiest Men Alive” issue, he seemed embarrassed. Fox sent over a gigantic mirror engraved with the words “Sexiest Man Alive.” Jokes were made. But, over time, he became less self-conscious about his personal upkeep. During “Family Guy’s” seventh season, a young woman began showing up at the office. Without explanation, she would wheel a large piece of equipment into a lavatory just off the writers’ room and wait there for MacFarlane, who would excuse himself and disappear into the bathroom. Several former staff members told me that although everyone could hear the whooshing sound of a spray-tan machine, no one dared make a joke about it when MacFarlane emerged, bronzed and burnished.

He has a more visible public persona than he did in the early days of the show. He pals around with Bill Maher, serves as a regular roast master for Comedy Central, and has become an advocate for atheism. Last fall, he received the Harvard Humanist of the Year award for “his extensive body of work, his active, passionate commitment to Humanist values, and his fearless support of equal marriage rights and other social justice issues.”

Sitting in the booth at the Polo Lounge, MacFarlane obligingly answered questions, but he didn’t enjoy talking about himself. I brought up his reputation as a ladies’ man; he has dated a string of starlets—Christa Campbell, Eliza Dushku, Kate Todd, Amanda Bynes, among others.

“It’s exhausting dating several people at once,” he said. “It gets tiresome, because people think they have you prematurely figured out.” I asked him if he felt that he’d been dating his equals, and if his relationship with his mother had had an impact on his personal life. He laughed nervously. “Uh, not always. I think I’ve dated women who were like my mom and women who weren’t, but”—he paused—“I’m not somebody who has to go home and talk about theoretical physics at the end of a day when I’ve already been wringing my brain dry.” He went on, “I don’t necessarily look for an intellectual equal. I’d rather have somebody whose company excites me. That’s what my father had. My father and my mother were not”—he cleared his throat—“they were not intellectual equals by any means.”

Despite his metamorphosis into a man about town, MacFarlane said that he doesn’t care about expensive things. “I’m interested in professional pursuits that I have not had experience with and are therefore a little scary,” he said. After almost two decades of doing TV, he found “Ted” to be such an experience. “The Flintstones” reboot had recently fizzled; Fox asked MacFarlane to redo the script that he turned in, and he declined. Still, he said, “I want to keep a hand in both media. A TV show takes nine months; the movie took four or five years. The human life span is finite, so if it takes four years to make a movie you think, Gosh, I could only make x number of movies. There’s a lot of ideas out there.”

The entrance to MacFarlane’s house is protected by an iron gate covered with vines. You reach the house itself, a Mediterranean-style villa, after traversing a long drive, canopied by sycamores and oaks and illuminated by huge plastic torchères that evoke Epcot Center. MacFarlane bought the compound a few years ago for thirteen and a half million dollars. On a clear day, you can see the beaches of Malibu to the west and the towers of downtown to the south. He lives there with a fat tuxedo cat named Chester. He reluctantly gave me a tour, but only after asking politely how long I intended to stay. “Oh, God, what can I show you?” he said, as he strode into his loftlike living room. The floors were dark wood and slab stone. “That’s a water wall,” he said, when I eyed the trickling water feature that framed the entry.

MacFarlane has put a light footprint on the house; there are only scattered signs of habitation. When I asked him whether there was something special about his sofa—a modish sectional covered with a brown cartoon print—he said no. “It’s a decorator’s couch. It looks like it should be a valuable antique, but it’s really just 2011 tasteless.” A wrought-iron chandelier hangs above a dining table, surrounded by twelve chairs. A bar cart sits in the corner next to a beautiful nine-foot Petrof piano, which MacFarlane said he plays every day after work.

In his den, he gestured toward a massive screen. I asked which television shows he likes, and he said that he doesn’t really watch TV; he prefers old movies—“Red River,” and Hope-and-Crosby pictures. Did he have any cool collections of comic books or action figures, like other comedy writers? He scoffed. There were a few signs of life in the kitchen: two large plastic bins of whey protein sat on a countertop, and on a kitchen island I saw a plastic caddy full of felt-tip markers. Next to it sat a pile of scripts and a photograph of MacFarlane as a child, with a stalk of wheat in his mouth. “At no point in my life since have I had a stalk of wheat in my mouth,” he said, breaking the silence. Near the counter was an empty desk. “I’ve never used it,” he said. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always used the kitchen counter.”

After ten minutes, I thanked him and prepared to leave. “I guess I could play you a song,” he offered, as I made my way out. He sat down at the piano and breezed through a melancholy rendition of “Days of Wine and Roses.” Then he showed me the door. ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.